The Daily Square – Harriet’s Got A Gun Edition
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The Tupperware Party As The New Marketing Metaphor
Every now and then, we are contacted by very kind individuals who are part of publishing “blogging outreach” programs. Based on our very careful, very detailed research, we have determined that these good folks are tasked with contacting bloggers of various persuasions and asking them if they would like free books. Your corporate website is not friendly nor usable enough to serve the community you’re trying to build. Truly, who doesn’t want free books? Let us suggest that this is a good first step, but not nearly enough. Yesterday, we began discussing the concept of niches. Today, we’re going to
Niche, Niche, Niche — All We Ever Do Is Niche
As news trickles our way from the 2007 BookExpo America gathering (breaking: air conditioning not so very available), we are gathering the threads of a few themes. Meaning, yes, we’ll be analyzing and discussing them over the next few days. A biggie to emerge from the conference is the concept of niches. Putting advertising where the customers are: so simple, it’s almost genius. Since the beginning of time, publishing has always been about niches — publishers simply pretended they were catering to a large mass of people, much like television did prior to the advent of lots and lots of
On Overcoming Writing Blocks
Everybody has a novel in progress. I hate to be left out of these trends. I have an idea that could not — despite herculean efforts — be squeezed into the 40 pages of a picture book. And once I train myself to write a page of text without immediately running off to paint the action, like a monkey reflexively jumping to an organ grinder, I shall begin. Opus day! – Interview with Berkeley Breathed
Only The Dinosaurs Are Extinct
Regular readers will recall that “death of the novel” stories appear in traditional print media (also, non-traditional non-print media) with comforting regularity. Sort of like Spring cleaning without the Windex. Somehow, there is an editorial guideline out there that equates “reading elsewhere” with the “death of reading”. We dispute this assertion. Those who declare that the novel is dead are living in caves. Sort of. Based on our careful, exhaustive research — some of which took us to the furthest corners of the globe, places hot and cold — we have determined that the story is as much a part
The Daily Square – Who Do You Love? Edition
Daily links from booksquare: booksquare
The “Have A Great Holiday” Post
So it’s the start of the Memorial Day holiday and we’re thinking ahead to three days of sloth (except for the shopping for the barbecue, then the actual cooking, oh, and, apparently we’re going to “clean”), and we’re thinking about summer reading. Summer reading is like winter reading except it frequently involves the hammock. Which leads to the book on the top of our list: Confessions of a Teen Sleuth. Normally, we do not fall for marketing ploys (a certain pink phone excepted) or gimmicks (ditto for the DSW shoe coupons), but we were suckered into this one before we
On The Job
Writers get obsessed with a project and lock the doors and sit and work at it, like animals in a leg trap trying to chew through the leg, which is not good strategy. My advice is to get out of the house and take a walk, a good first cure for the depression that hits after you’ve been working for a year and it dawns on you that your book is not “Huckleberry Finn” but you must finish it anyway because the publisher’s generous advance has been spent on a new pair of shoes for the baby and she has